- #1
bakindabacon
Hi all,
I have dreamed of doing research in biophysics to develop organic nanomachines which can treat people's medical problems by rebuilding them from the bottom up. The root of this comes from my own life experience. I grew up with unidentified learning issues as well as emotional and social problems and I deeply identify with the losers of the world. I really want to rise above being a loser but I fear that I am lacking the basic mental faculties to understand physics.
I am lucky enough to have strong math and language ability so word problems and higher level math (multivariable calculus, differential equations, etc.) have come pretty easy to me at the undergraduate level. I have gotten A's in intermediate mechanics, electromagnetism, and thermodynamics. However I have very bad understanding of the actual physical phenomena, so physics classes are little more than just math classes to me. I feel like I am a fraud because people think I have a bright future in graduate school, and I might be able to score well enough on the GRE to get into a physics program. I just don't understand the "physical" part of physics.
I believe the problem is that I have sensory processing disorder, which means my mind and body are out of sync with the world. This means I have horrible physical insight (knowing how things are going to move, identifying forces in mechanics problems)
In my life, this has manifested itself as extreme clumsiness, no sense of time, difficulty keeping rhythm, poor spatial awareness of my own body, bad reaction time, weak memory for short exposure stimuli (fast speech, motion). I cannot understand for the life of me why I can do mental rotations, put things together and process maps on the fly while driving all with ease, but I have trouble knowing if I parked my car straight or crooked, how to eat without spilling something or throwing and catching a ball.
The whole point of physics is to quantify your experiences of the physical world which means connecting your whole lifetime of sensory experiences with equations. While I have always been excellent at mathematical problem solving and geometric visualization, I have horrible physical intuition. For example, I can't tell how long something takes to happen which makes my understanding of basic kinematics purely mathematical because I don't intuitively know if something is speeding up or slowing down unless I repeatedly watch a video of it.
Sometimes I don't remember the direction my body moves when a car goes around a curve or how something feels right before it stops sliding and begins to roll. Other times I can't figure out where something actually is in a mirror, or if a wide stream of water feels harder than a narrow stream of water.
I have had to memorize the setup for problems that involve tension or have unusual situations like a bosun's chair or multiple spring and pulley setups because I get confused trying to work it out through physical intuition.
I want this world of physics to be more than a bunch of mathematical equations, I want to actually experience with my senses in a meaningful way what I am learning. I am at a loss because my problem is with connecting everyday experiences I have had hundreds of times over the course of my life with the equations that I learn. I am stubborn as a mule so giving up has never occurred to me, but I want to be able to get my PhD by age 40, so how can I bridge that gap between my real life and the equations? Thank you very much for reading this far.
I have dreamed of doing research in biophysics to develop organic nanomachines which can treat people's medical problems by rebuilding them from the bottom up. The root of this comes from my own life experience. I grew up with unidentified learning issues as well as emotional and social problems and I deeply identify with the losers of the world. I really want to rise above being a loser but I fear that I am lacking the basic mental faculties to understand physics.
I am lucky enough to have strong math and language ability so word problems and higher level math (multivariable calculus, differential equations, etc.) have come pretty easy to me at the undergraduate level. I have gotten A's in intermediate mechanics, electromagnetism, and thermodynamics. However I have very bad understanding of the actual physical phenomena, so physics classes are little more than just math classes to me. I feel like I am a fraud because people think I have a bright future in graduate school, and I might be able to score well enough on the GRE to get into a physics program. I just don't understand the "physical" part of physics.
I believe the problem is that I have sensory processing disorder, which means my mind and body are out of sync with the world. This means I have horrible physical insight (knowing how things are going to move, identifying forces in mechanics problems)
In my life, this has manifested itself as extreme clumsiness, no sense of time, difficulty keeping rhythm, poor spatial awareness of my own body, bad reaction time, weak memory for short exposure stimuli (fast speech, motion). I cannot understand for the life of me why I can do mental rotations, put things together and process maps on the fly while driving all with ease, but I have trouble knowing if I parked my car straight or crooked, how to eat without spilling something or throwing and catching a ball.
The whole point of physics is to quantify your experiences of the physical world which means connecting your whole lifetime of sensory experiences with equations. While I have always been excellent at mathematical problem solving and geometric visualization, I have horrible physical intuition. For example, I can't tell how long something takes to happen which makes my understanding of basic kinematics purely mathematical because I don't intuitively know if something is speeding up or slowing down unless I repeatedly watch a video of it.
Sometimes I don't remember the direction my body moves when a car goes around a curve or how something feels right before it stops sliding and begins to roll. Other times I can't figure out where something actually is in a mirror, or if a wide stream of water feels harder than a narrow stream of water.
I have had to memorize the setup for problems that involve tension or have unusual situations like a bosun's chair or multiple spring and pulley setups because I get confused trying to work it out through physical intuition.
I want this world of physics to be more than a bunch of mathematical equations, I want to actually experience with my senses in a meaningful way what I am learning. I am at a loss because my problem is with connecting everyday experiences I have had hundreds of times over the course of my life with the equations that I learn. I am stubborn as a mule so giving up has never occurred to me, but I want to be able to get my PhD by age 40, so how can I bridge that gap between my real life and the equations? Thank you very much for reading this far.
